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How many rape allegations do cops need to face before they get canned?

August 1, 2007
R.I. Police Officer Accused of Rape
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:39 p.m. ET
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- A police officer was accused Wednesday of raping a 19-year-old woman at a deserted police substation, then showing up at a nearby home to handle the woman's complaint after she called 911, prosecutors said.
A grand jury indicted Providence patrolman Marcus Huffman, 37, on a single count of first-degree sexual assault, said Michael Healey, a spokesman for Attorney General Patrick Lynch.
Huffman allegedly met the woman while on duty March 18 at Platforms Dance Club near the city's harbor. The woman was turned away by the club's owner because she appeared intoxicated, and the officer offered her a ride home, Healey said.
Instead, Huffman allegedly drove her to a police substation that prosecutors believe was deserted and raped her inside, Healey said.
The woman later called 911 from a nearby relative's house, and Huffman was dispatched to the scene along with two other officers, Healey said. As the senior officer, Huffman handled the woman's complaint, he said.
''He later filed a report which we allege failed to include important facts, among which were any mention of the incident involving him and the victim,'' Healey said.
State Police detectives are still investigating the case. An arraignment is scheduled for Aug. 15, and Huffman will remain free until then, Healey said.
Huffman has been suspended without pay, police officials told WPRI-TV. His attorney did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Earlier in his 13-year career on the police force, Huffman was accused of two sex crimes, but never convicted.
Months after joining the police department, prosecutors charged Huffman, then 25, with having sexual relations with a 10-year-old girl while he was 16 and 17. A Superior Court judge dismissed the charges, noting there was no evidence of coercion or force.
Minutes after that acquittal, prosecutors charged Huffman with trying to extort sex from a convicted prostitute while on duty. Prosecutors agreed to resubmit the case to another grand jury after obtaining evidence suggesting the purported victim was lying.
The second grand jury didn't press charges, and the case was dropped.
In 1998, a district court judge convicted Huffman of three misdemeanor counts of simple assault for putting the director of the Registry of Motor Vehicles in a headlock and attacking two other employees. He received a one-year suspended sentence.

After client consultation, contact police?

Kan. Prosecutors to Seek Death Penalty
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 1, 2007

Filed at 5:11 p.m. ET

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) -- Prosecutors said Wednesday they plan to seek the death penalty for a man accused of kidnapping an 18-year-old woman from a store parking lot, then raping and strangling her.

Edwin R. Hall was indicted Tuesday on charges of kidnapping, rape, aggravated sodomy and capital murder in the slaying of Kelsey Smith in June, Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline said.

Hall, 26, is accused of abducting Smith on June 2 from the parking lot of a Target store in suburban Kansas City. Grainy surveillance video from the store showed Smith being confronted and pushed into her car.

Her body was found four days later in a park about 20 miles away in Missouri. Hall was interviewed and arrested June 6, after he saw himself on television in surveillance video and contacted a lawyer, who contacted police.

Hall pleaded not guilty to all charges at his arraignment Wednesday. His next court appearance was scheduled for Aug. 15. One of his attorneys, Carl Cornwell, said he had expected Kline to seek the death penalty.

The grand jury indictment replaced the same charges brought by Kline's office last month.

Smith's father, Greg Smith, said he and his wife have been pleased with the court proceedings so far.

''We are extremely appreciative of Mr. Kline honoring our daughter's memory, and we want to make sure this trial is a fair trial,'' Greg Smith said after Wednesday's hearing.

What attitude should PDs have towards victims/opposing counsel?

Skelly has a great post that raises a good question. How should a defense attorney for the poor feel towards and treat a victim, their family, or opposing counsel? One view confrontational view is:

“When I’m on trial and we’re in a truly adversarial proceeding, I hate the mother of the victim. I hate the father of the victim, I hate the children of the victim. I hate every part of it. It’s actually a terrible thing, but I can literally hate them when I’m fighting. I have to.”

I have one source for an asnwer. The oath sworn by Florida bar members states in pertinent part:

"I will abstain from all offensive personality and advance no fact prejudicial to the honor or reputation of a party or witness, unless required by the justice of the cause with which I am charged;"

There are times where a defense lawyer must be offensive to be effective, but there are also many instances where a lawyer is simply offensive and thus becomes less effective. Guess what, no matter how fantastic a lawyer you are, as a public defender, most of your clients are going to be guilty. Thus, being an arse during pretrial hearings or depositions (yes, we get automatic depositions here, another great reason to be a defense lawyer in Florida state court) can make it far more difficult to get the plea that you want and your client deserves.

Trials are different. There are fewer opportunities to compromise. But first, I'll admit that I'm always looking for a way to get what my client wants. If a client is more interested in a settlement and a safe plea, then this could happen at any time up to and even after the jury verdict has come back! I mean, if you create some great appellate issues, you may want to approach the state and suggest an amenable resolution that will save the need for an appeal and the uncertainty that brings to both sides. This includes the recognition that the state may be very interested in closure for their victim or the victim's family, something a defense attorney can often be instrumental in bringing about. If obstructionism and closure is the only tool in our arsenal, why fritter away this opportunity to serve the client's needs by being unduly unpleasant?

When is it time to treat a victim or their family offensively? Well, when they come into court and lie on your client they become fair game. Same for any cops who do the same. Gently taking them downa notch is always an effective way to get a jury to reasonable doubt. If the key witnesses are incredible, you've got some great arguments.

A problem comes when a defense lawyer demonstrates excessive vitriol. Put forth enough energy to demonstrate your displeasure, but why hate? Hate is an evil word. Hate and revenge are natural feelings that people have but they are quite often what you want the jurors to suppress and ignore. My view is that if you get in a hate-off with the government and a wronged victim and/or the victim's family, your client loses. Our clients are rarely sympathetic. Sure, when I get an ex-military or otherwise really sympathetic client, I use that, but more often our clients are pretty down on the food chain. Jurors will far more easily sympathize with, say the person whose home or car was burglarized than a drug addict who needed a fix.

I love this quote from Skelly:

"Everyone, even the guilty criminal--especially the guilty criminal!--needs a companion, a friend, someone to stand with him and for him..." The defense lawyer's job is to force the system to acknowledge that the defendant is not just a social misfit, or a statistic, or a criminal, but a human being with hopes and dreams and fears. A human being who, like any of us, stands in need of repentance and redemption.. The question for the Christian lawyer is not, 'How can you work to get a guilty person off?' The real question is, 'Will you stand by this person, this flawed and sinful human being, and speak a word on his behalf?'" - Joseph G. Allegretti,The Lawyer's Calling

How can one show the humanity of a client and ask for the benefit of the doubt by denying the humanity of a person who was victimized by crime? Certainly liars do not deserve any sympathy from us, but treating liars with respect in exposing their lies is a good idea, I'd say, except and until the witness requires a forceful reaction.

I have no problem shedding a witness, but you usually do it with gentle questions and save the strong arguments for closing (after setting these issues up by getting them from the juror's mouths during voir dire and reminding them of what they'll see in opening statements). People who think that an attorney's consistently angry demeanor or clear dislike of the victim will win cases has obviously watched too much Law and Order and taken the wrong lessons. The lesson is that if you are perceived as the slimy defense lawyer with no concern for the humanity of the victim or their family, why should the jurors care about your client? To be persuasive, you want to be the most reasonable person in the room. A reasonable person recognizes the anger a person would feel from having their family member murdered, for example.

The point about focusing your sympathy on the client is well-taken. One can never focus on the sadness everyone can feel for sympathetic victims. Everyone should be able to feel sorry for families of murder victims, people who've been sexually abused, or people who've had things stolen or been physically attacked. But that feeling cannot dominate. One must feel most sympathetic for the client and their situation.

Too many defense lawyers for the poor get burned out. Then the lawyer gets fixated on how horrible their clients are for the things they do. And then instead of wanting to take responsiblity, the clients have the terminity to demand things like meeting with their lawyer! My attitude there is that, when necessary, a lawyer needs to gain the trust of the client and help them take responsiblity.

If the client doesn't want to take responsiblity after you've fully educated them, then fight along with them as much as you ethically can! Many clients just want someone to say that they believe in them, then all they want is a plea and the least jail time. If that's what they want, that's what you need to try and get for them. A client is a person whose view is to be respected, not a tool to use against the state or the judge to try and clog up the system. If the client wants to take that role and fight, good for them, but not at my behest.

After listening enough, the client will understand when you explain why, for example, they are likely to lose (if they are). If they still trust your advice and insist that they didn't do it or can't take this plea for X or Y reason, then you've got that red light to go to trial. Then break out the war paint. But you should always remember the teachings of Sun Tzu: "One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful." Don't fight unless you have to, and if you do fight, fight in a way that the enemy (the victim, victim's family, the government) will not be angry at your scorched earth tactics, unless they are absolutely necessary.

Helping children before I need to help them

I've often represented children accused of crimes that will make the delinquent, or worse, adult felons. These are never happy times. Children that face criminal or deliquency accusations usually have had difficult lives. Most people will face a time when they face adversity and must make really tough decisions. Naturally, dispute resolution and coping skills are often lacking in my clients. This leads to many difficulties in trying to help them make good decisions. Often, those are the exact areas in which they lack skills.

What do I often wish for these kids (and even some of the adults I see?). I wish that they got the same opportunities that we all need for a proper education. As I've often claimed, not only is this a more compassionate way to handle our nation's children, it is also cost effective:

Recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the early years are vital to cognitive development, which in turn is important to subsequent success and productivity in school, life, and work. Early-childhood nurturing has traditionally been the province of families. But families are deteriorating.
Roughly one in six kids was born into poverty or single parenthood or both in 1970. In 2000, the rate was about one in four. What's more, almost 10 percent of children were born to unmarried teenage mothers in 1999; these kids tend to receive especially low levels of emotional and intellectual support and cognitive stimulation. They arrive at kindergarten cognitively disadvantaged, and the gap widens as they get older, eventually leading to early babies, lousy jobs, and elevated crime.

I am generally against government intervention, but it is important here. How many times have I seen children without support? I will always speak to parents about their kids case. It is only rarely that I speak to a parent or a child about their parents and think that their child really gets all the support they need.

I do not want to attack single parents, but a single woman cannot provide a male role model nor can she easily find one, it seems. Further, a single parent can show a child why escaping a bad relationship is required, but they cannot show how a good relationship should work because of the simple fact that they don't have a good one!

Common sense says that it is easier to do things together with a partner than alone and given that the government has taken away the parents of so many children I represent by imprisoning them, the next best thing to giving them back a parent is to help these children out with education so they don't fall into the same traps of their parents. And this god awful government policy of discouraging frank talk about birth control really chaps my hide. The people who are not willing to step-in and adopt the child born by an uneducated poor girl who is taken advantage of or simply makes a bad decision and has unprotected sex need to step back and let people who care about our society help prevent these tragic circumstances from occurring.

Long time no post

Sorry, been busy with stuff. You know how that goes, defending poor clients when you could really get along a lot easier if you had 1/4 the caseload.

Cato has a good map Botched Paramilitary Police Raids: An Epidemic of "Isolated Incidents".

And I have to continue my trend of posting about the U.S. Attorney debacle, starting with the N.Y. Times article about the Monica problem. Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official:

Ms. [Monica] Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés
that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that
were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said. And she helped
maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to
the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted
if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

That's sad, but not as sad as this:

Ms. Goodling complained that staff members in Puerto Rico had used rap music in
a public service announcement intended to discourage gun crime.
“That is just
outrageous,” she told one department lawyer. “How could they use government
money for an ad that featured rap music? That kind of music glorifies violence.”

Has she seen the Reno 911 fake ads? I bet the US Attorney ads in Puerto Rico were about as sad, yet she's still upset!

This TalkLeft piece further solidified how slimy these hacks are. They kicked a guy out of his career so they could make room for a political appointee despite his desire to try a final case about a murder of a woman and kidnapping of her fetus? That shows how much 'respect for life' the administration has, nothing compares to the pursuit and consolidation of power.

Gonzales has got to go

This is amazing:

The former aide, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned two weeks ago, told the Senate
Judiciary Committee that Mr. Gonzales’s statements about the prosecutors’
dismissals were inaccurate and that the attorney general had been repeatedly
advised of the planning for them.

He's gonna be gone soon, I bet. The AG has the same attitude as NYPD with their ignorant spying on "members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies." Seriously, how dumb is the government agency that thinks that antiwar organizations, environmentalists, and death penalty opponents are going to do anything other than civil disobediance?

What else, besides Gonzales' tenure, has got to go? The drug war's battle on prescription issuing doctors. After all, did you see that study saying Alcohol, Tobacco Worse Than Drugs.

Firing U.S. Attorneys

The following editorial from Adam Cohen of the N.Y. Times is very apropos:

The Bush administration has done a terrible job of explaining its decision to fire eight United States attorneys. Story after story has proved to be untrue: that the prosecutors who were fired were poor performers; that the White House was not involved in the purge. But the administration has been strangely successful in pushing its message that the scandal is at worst a political misdeed, not a criminal matter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/opinion/19mon4.html

Seriously, if our politicians are lying about this, criminal charges may be appropriate. I'm not saying that anybody deserves to go to prison or anything, but there should be some ramifications. Clinton got disbarred for his attempted artful deception about his affair with a young intern that was unrelated to his actual performance in office, if the GOP has liars impugning the credibility of their own faithful republicans who fail to follow the party line, something has got to give.

David Iglesias' op-ed also in the Times starkly lays out how mendacious the White House and its lackeys at the DOJ has been:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/opinion/21iglesias.html

At the least, Sen. Domenici and Rep. Wilson need to lose their next election for such a shameless attempt to manipulate a career-prosecutor into bringing a criminal case for political game. That sort of thing is expected only in other countries that lack the rule of law, but not in America.

Work not hard enough? Become a PD!

Time to vent with complaints. Why is it that there are never enough hours in the day? There is always more work to be done. I guess I have it better than most, but I dislike feeling like I have so much more to do. Some others take it just as hard or harder, but some people seem to not care. It is not just the most sympathetic clients I want to work hard for. I mean, they are just gravy. It is even the difficult clients who appear pretty guilty but require repeated explanation. Those are the ones who take more time, or at least more effort and patience, than I seem to have.

How should I decide who gets help in what proportion? I have far more work than I can do, but why should I get to decide? Clients who really don't have the money always ask, should I hire a private? Of course hire an attorney. But they really can't, they're just worried about whether I will help them, or be like the lazy/overworked PDs they've been screwed by. But if you don't have enough money, I know, you'll get worse represenation from an attorney with less real courtroom experience. Of course, private lawyers are far more expert at collecting money and then withdrawing as soon as the client refuses to take a plea - something I find repugnant, perhaps in part because I'm jealous that I can't similarly force my clients to take a plea when going to trial is just going to put them deeper in trouble.

But the worst is this: what do you do when the client doesn't want to go to trial (because they know they're screwed) but they don't want the plea options available. Do I look like I have magic beans? Even if I did, would I use them to cut a repeat felons prison time in half like they desire? Well, I probably would, even for the really difficult clients, or maybe especially for them, because it would make my job so much easier ;-)

Political prosecutions

I have been disgusted, but not terribly surprised, by this story: Ex-Prosecutors Tell of Pressures From Lawmakers. Allowing the executive branch of either party, but particularly the very corrupt as-of-late GOP, the unfettered ability to dismiss and reassign head federal prosecutors is a situation rife for abuse. The appearance of impropriety is vast, but it appears there has been more than that. We've had direct pressure from politicians for prosecutors to act, or lose their jobs. In terms of damage to our society, this sort of corruption, more so than the recent Libby conviction, crys out for punishment. I'm never one to advocate imprisonment, but a term of probation and a loss of political office for all those involved should be required. Of course, who is able to prosecute those who manipulate the prosecutors? Sadly, it should be left to the voters to strike the only blow for justice by punishing the GOP in the next election, thereby giving the Dems a chance to screw things up so they can get thrown out again, methinks.